After producing the Ease of Schedule since 1997, I have finally come to conclusions based on lengthy experience and review. While the natural progression was to continually refine this "strength of schedule" until it because lists for individual positions, the reality proven was that it became less accurate and less reliable.

The bottom line is that so many offense use their ball handlers in vastly different ways from one another so that taking it as granular as reviewing "tight ends" was just wildly inaccurate and eventually even misleading.

The reality is that each team passes and rushes the ball - no matter what team you are talking about. There is a commonality among all teams in those two metrics. So I have returned the Ease of Schedule back to being only for rushing numbers (rushing yards and touchdowns scored by running backs) and passing numbers (all passing yardage and scores thrown by a quarterback).

Every team runs with their running backs so that is a direct correlation. Each team passes but you need to use some wisdom there because Philly throws to running backs, the Chargers throw to their tight end and the Bengals only throw to their wide receivers. So passing "ease" has to be applied to each team as they would use their players.

But that is not enough. In my quest to refine tools to be the most effective and accurate as I can, I constantly review the results and methods for improvement. And the change this year is that no longer are the "good" and "bad" matchups related to a team. They are now related to both team and venue. The reality is that many teams play much differently on the road than they do at home. What this season's improved (2.0) Ease of Schedule has done is to take each NFL defense and consider them as two separate entities. One on the road and the other at home. In some cases, it did not matter - both were great for a team (or really bad). In others, it certainly did. Taking the eight home games and eight road games, each had their highest and lowest games removed to eliminate uncharacteristic extremes. Then the per game average fantasy points allowed were determined from the six remaining home and six remaining road games. From a total set of 64 possibilities (32 defenses both home and away), the best and worst 16 matchups were used.

This is the most accurate picture of defenses from last year - hands down. While regular season EOS will not split them out because of a lack of adequate sample size, the preseason EOS considered venue in addition to the defense - it makes a difference. For passing, this still led to a nice split of eight each of home and road games for both the good and bad matchups. But this is much more accurate than we have been in the past. And more accurate than any other you will find.

Three different views are given below - Weeks 1 to 6 show what players will face as they start the season. Weeks 1 through 16 are shown for a full season view and weeks 14 to 16 show the most common weeks for fantasy playoffs. Below that is the NFL schedule marked for each team to show when they have good (green) or bad (red) match-ups.